Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures Using Microservices: An Experience Report

Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes, like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its promised benefits

Distributed software development in a financial services organisation

The outsourcing of IS functionality to offshore development firms has been a growth industry that has blossomed over the last 10 years. This is as a result of organisations, seeking to optimise costs, mitigate risks, and achieve greater return on shareholder value by delegating the delivery of business information systems and applications to third party vendors. At the same time, distributed approaches to software development has arisen, there has been a growing interest in the applicability of lightweight or Agile development methodologies. As such, this paper this paper discusses experiences of a European Financial Services firm in outsourcing, and subsequently offshoring, two of its IT projects to vendor firms in India, where Agile approaches were used. The authors provide a model of the financial firm’s critical success factors presented as a frame of reference for others interested and involved in this topical area

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Migrations to Microservices-Based Architectures - a Tale of Technical and Organizational Change

As software systems evolve and scale faster than the foundations on which they are structured on, software architecture migrations to modern, cutting edge paradigms of development are becoming common. An example of such a paradigm is Microservices-based Architectures (MSAs). With MSAs, organizations can manage the complexity of their software and deploy individual pieces autonomously and independently.\ua0However, migrating towards microservices entails a lot of complexity. The evolution of the structures that a migration predisposes is multifaceted, with a socio-technical nature.Therefore, this thesis aims to first of all understand the process in which decisions are made by engineers to migrate their software architecture towards microservices. In addition, this thesis targets to aggregate the migration journey of organizations that change their software architecture to microservices. Finally, it is demonstrated how an organization\u27s operations implement different processes for software architecture migrations and development methodologies

Cloud migration patterns: a multi-cloud service architecture perspective

Many organizations migrate their on-premise software systems to the cloud. However, current coarse-grained cloud migration solutions have made a transparent migration of on-premise applications to the cloud a difficult, sometimes trial-and-error based endeavor. This paper suggests a catalogue of fine-grained service-based cloud architecture migration patterns that target multi-cloud settings and are specified with architectural notations. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evi-dence from a number of migration projects, best practices for cloud architectures and a systematic literature review of existing research. The pattern catalogue allows an or-ganization to (1) select appropriate architecture migration patterns based on their ob-jectives, (2) compose them to define a migration plan, and (3) extend them based on the identification of new patterns in new contexts

Pattern-based multi-cloud architecture migration

Many organizations migrate on-premise software applications to the cloud. However, current coarse-grained cloud migration solutions have made such migrations a non transparent task, an endeavor based on trial-anderror. This paper presents Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration .V-PAM), a migration method based on (i) a catalogue of fine-grained service-based cloud architecture migration patterns that target multi-cloud, (ii) a situational migration process framework to guide pattern selection and composition, and (iii) a variability model to structure system migration into a coherent framework. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evidence from several migration projects, best practice for cloud architectures and a systematic literature review of existing research. Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration allows an organization to (i) select appropriate migration patterns, (ii) compose them to define a migration plan, and (iii) extend them based on the identification of new patterns in new contexts. The patterns are at the core of our solution, embedded into a process model, with their selection governed by a variability model

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table